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SS Thielbek (1940)

1940 ships1945 in GermanyBay of LübeckMaritime incidents in May 1945Merchant ships of West Germany
Military scandalsNazi war crimes in GermanyShip infoboxes without an imageShips sunk by British aircraftSteamships of GermanySteamships of West GermanyWorld War II massacresWorld War II merchant ships of GermanyWorld War II shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea

Thielbek was a 2,815 GRT cargo steamship that was built in Germany in 1940, sunk in an air raid in 1945, refloated in 1949 and repaired, and was in service until 1974. Lübecker Maschinenbau Gesellschaft in Lübeck built her in 1940 for the Knöhr and Burchard shipping company of Hamburg. In 1961 Knöhr and Burchard sold her to buyers who renamed her Magdalene and registered her in Panama. In 1965 she was renamed Old Warrior. She was scrapped in Yugoslavia in 1974. Thielbek is notable for having been sunk by RAF aircraft on 3 May 1945, killing 2,750 people aboard. She was at anchor in the Bay of Lübeck with the passenger ships Cap Arcona and the Deutschland, which were sunk in the same air raid. At the time Cap Arcona and Thielbek were crowded with prisoners from the Neuengamme, Stutthof, and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps. Under Allied interrogation, the commander of the Gestapo in Hamburg later revealed that the prisoners were to be killed, possibly by scuttling the ships with the prisoners still aboard.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article SS Thielbek (1940) (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

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Latitude Longitude
N 54.071666666667 ° E 10.84 °
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Pelzerhaken


23730
Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
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